Distilling OmniVoice into Aegis: Female Urdu TTS at 61 MB ONNX for CPU Inference

Aegis is a female Urdu text-to-speech (TTS) model designed for CPU inference, developed through data level distillation, which compresses the capabilities of a large multilingual system, OmniVoice, into a smaller, practical format suitable for offline use. The model, approximately 61 MB in ONNX format, addresses the scarcity of female Urdu TTS options by using a zero-shot TTS model to generate synthetic training data from a consented female reference clip. This process allows for the creation of a compact student model, utilizing a VITS medium network and trained with the piper1-gpl stack, to deliver a deployable female Urdu voice under a permissive MIT license. While Aegis does not yet include formal intelligibility metrics, it is positioned as a complementary, gender-specific alternative to existing male Urdu models and offers a pathway for inclusion in community voice catalogs.

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